“Oh, yes. But first I kissed him,” Simone answered, as she slipped her room key into her handbag and hung the bag up on a peg.
“You didn’t!” Phoebe gasped and ceased her pacing.
“And then we went up to the sun deck and made love on a chaise lounge,” Simone continued, enjoying herself.
“All the saints!” Phoebe whispered, eyes as wide as saucers.
“She is teasing you, Phoebe,” the Belgian said from the window.
“But . . . but . . .” Phoebe stammered.
“I am kidding,” Simone said, setting the latch on their door.
“Ohhhh, you!” Phoebe laughed and commenced to pacing again, lightly patting her child on the back to hasten sleep.
Simone had toyed with going to the cinema or maybe to the game room but she didn’t want to go alone, and Phoebe certainly couldn’t with Douglas. She had no desire to ask the quiet Belgian if she wanted to go. And she was strangely tired, a side effect of being pregnant, she’d heard.
The little bathroom was available, so Simone got into her own pajamas, stroked the little mound that was Everett’s child, and brushed her teeth.
When she emerged from the bathroom, little Douglas was asleep in his bunk. Phoebe got out a deck of cards and asked if the three of them could play a few games to get her mind off the fact that they were bobbing on the North Atlantic on a freezing night in February.
They arranged their bed pillows on the square space below the two portholes, covered now by a curtain that Katrine had drawn so that Phoebe didn’t have to look out at the black nothingness of the open sea.
“How about gin? Shall we play gin?” Phoebe began to shuffle the cards. The ship rolled beneath them and several cards fluttered out of the deck. “Why does it have to keep doing that!”
“Here.” Simone held out her hand and Phoebe gave her the deck. She counted out ten cards apiece and then set the rest of the deck in the middle of their circle of pillows.
They played for a few minutes, Phoebe chattering about nothing and everything and making a clucking sound every time the ship leaned or rocked.
Katrine was particularly quiet, playing her hand with little interest. Even jabbering Phoebe noticed that Katrine seemed unhappy.
“Goodness, Katrine. Are you homesick already? Aren’t you excited about seeing your husband?” Phoebe said.
The Belgian looked up from her cards. “What?”
“You didn’t hear anything I said?”
“I . . . No. I’m sorry.”
Phoebe folded her cards into her hand. “What is the matter? You seem so sad. The rest of us can’t wait to get to America. You want to go back to Belgium? Is that it?”
“No!” The answer was swift and loud.
Little Douglas stirred on his bunk and then settled again.
“No,” Katrine said again, more softly this time. She looked from Phoebe to Simone and her bottom lip trembled slightly. “I . . . I want very much to go to America.”
“But you seem so sad,” Phoebe persisted.
Tears rimmed Katrine’s eyes and she blinked them away. “I lost someone dear to me a few days ago. Sometimes I start thinking about her and I cannot stop.”
“Oh! Oh, my!” Phoebe instantly teared up as well. “Who was she?”
“She was my best friend. We met at a ballet school when we were both seven. She was like a sister to me.” Tears slipped down her cheeks.
The depth of the woman’s sorrow somehow softened her German accent. It still unnerved Simone to hear it, but compassion for the woman was outweighing her aversion. “I’m so sorry, Katrine,” Simone said.
“What happened to her?” Phoebe pressed.
“We were in . . . in my grandfather’s car, coming back from visiting my parents’ graves. It was my last day in England. There was ice everywhere but we did not see it. The car slid off the road and tumbled over and over into a ditch. When I came awake, she was dead beside me.”
“Oh, Katrine! That is so very sad!” Phoebe blotted her eyes with the sleeves of her bathrobe.
That explained the little bruise above Katrine’s right eye and the curious limp she had, Simone thought. “And she came to England to see you off to America?” she asked.
“She came to England with me to escape her husband. He . . . he is a Nazi. And a monster to her.”
“What did he do?” Phoebe whispered.
Katrine hesitated a moment. “Whatever he wanted.”
The three women were quiet. Simone noticed that her own cheeks were now wet.
“She hadn’t wanted to marry him,” Katrine finally continued. “But he didn’t care. And he was a ministry official, so her parents told her she had to marry him when he said he wanted her for his wife. He made her do things she did not want to do. And if she told him no, he beat her. He wouldn’t let her out of their apartment. Some days she would sneak out anyway.”
Phoebe stared at the Belgian woman, openmouthed.
“And you could do nothing, could you?” Simone said.
Katrine shook her head. “I didn’t even know. The war kept us apart. Her parents moved away and they didn’t want Annaliese having any contact with me.”
“That was her name? Annaliese?” Phoebe asked.
“Yes. I didn’t know what had become of her until she showed up in the middle of the night at my house in Belgium. She had run away from her husband, and swum across the river that bordered the two countries in nothing but a ballet leotard. She spent the rest of the war with me, hiding from him. I brought her with me to England after the war was over because I didn’t want him to find her.”
“And now she’s dead?” Phoebe shook her head sadly.
“Yes.” Katrine covered her face with her hands.
Phoebe scooted over to her and pulled her into an embrace.
“But she’d want you to be happy now, wouldn’t she? You did your best to protect her. Your very best. She’d want you to think about the new life you will have in America with your sweet husband. What is his name again?”
“John,” Katrine answered, her voice barely a whisper.
“Yes, with John. And that terrible brute can’t hurt your friend anymore now, can he?”
Katrine shook her head slowly from side to side.
“So tell us how you and John fell in love, eh, Katrine? Tell us that!”
Katrine leaned in to Phoebe. “I don’t know how it happened. It just did. He and some of his men stayed next door to Annaliese and me. They were scouting out our village. They knew the Germans would be coming. Then one day the Germans did arrive. And nearly every man in his battalion was massacred in a field after they’d surrendered. The SS thought John was dead, too, because he was lying in that field covered in bodies and blood. He brought the only man he found alive back to the house, but that man died on my kitchen floor.”
Simone reached out to the Belgian woman and placed her hand on her knee in a wordless sign of solidarity.
Phoebe turned her head to face Simone, her expression one of dazed shock. “Do you, um, want to tell us how you fell in love with your American, Simone?”
“Everett and I fell in love while waiting, and let’s just leave it at that, shall we?” Simone answered, after a moment.
The Belgian held her gaze for just a moment before looking away.
Twenty-nine
RMS QUEEN MARY
1946
For the next couple of days, Annaliese kept to herself as much as possible, declining offers to walk the sun deck with Phoebe and Douglas and only attending the afternoon classes on what the war brides could expect life to be like in America. In the evenings, Phoebe wanted to go to the cinema and play bingo and chat with the other mothers about the cute or funny or exasperating things their children were doing. Annaliese offered to mind Douglas after dinner so that she could have a reaso
n to stay in the cabin and maintain an inconspicuous presence on the ship.
She did not mind the many hours in relative seclusion. The ship had settled into a gentle agreement with the North Atlantic, and the undulant movement now felt more like a mother rocking a child to sleep. Simone, like Annaliese, seemed to also prefer to be on her own or chatting with the few other French-speaking people on board—including the moon-eyed dining room steward. When the three roommates were in the stateroom at the same time or together in the dining salon at meals, Annaliese would catch the French woman sneaking glances at her. Annaliese’s German-accented English unnerved Simone, that much was obvious, and Annaliese wondered what she’d suffered in the war to have such an aversion to even the sound of a German voice.
Annaliese spent the quiet evening hours with Douglas rehearsing in her mind her vanishing act. The women had been told that when they docked in New York, the few non–war bride passengers and military personnel would get off first. Then the war brides whose husbands were meeting them in New York would disembark in groups of fifty to board buses bound for a nearby armory. The brides who would be traveling by train to other destinations would get off last. They would board different buses that would take them to Grand Central Station. Katrine’s husband, John, would be one of those at the armory waiting for his wife. Annaliese had his last letter in Katrine’s purse.
Her plan was to get on the bus to the armory as expected, but then to pretend to be so nervous and excited that she’d need to use the ladies’ room as soon as they got off the bus and before they entered the big meeting room where all the husbands would be waiting. She’d duck away to use the restroom, popping in for just a moment to leave the letter she had already written to John, which explained why she had impersonated Katrine and how desperately sorry she was. She’d leave the letter, with his name on the envelope, sitting on the countertop. When someone came to see what was taking her so long, probably a Red Cross worker, the matron would see the letter but not her. The matron would check all the stalls, calling out Katrine’s name. She would exit the restroom with the letter in hand, looking every which way for Katrine Sawyer.
With all those brides and all the husbands and all the crying children, there would be enough chaos to be able to slip away unnoticed. Annaliese was counting on it. She didn’t know where in Manhattan the armory was—likely not very far from the harbor, and therefore not far away from a taxi rank. She would hail one and get to the train station. Then she would buy a ticket that would get her as far south or west as she could go.
She would never use the name Annaliese again.
And she would be free.
Annaliese had just imagined the entire escape plan from start to finish as she sat atop her bunk when Phoebe returned from the cinema clutching a little bag of caramel corn, which she handed to Annaliese. Simone followed a few minutes later, smelling of cigarette smoke. It was late, and the other two women got into their pajamas and were in bed minutes later.
“So did you spend the evening with that dining room waiter?” Phoebe asked Simone above her, in a low voice so as not to wake Douglas.
“It was only a few minutes, Mama,” Simone said.
“Go ahead and laugh!” Phoebe replied with a hushed chuckle. “That boy is positively smitten with you. You’re going to break his heart when we dock. Isn’t she, Katrine?”
“He will forget about me in a day,” Simone answered before Annaliese could say anything.
“What the devil does he want to talk about anyway?” Phoebe went on. “Still the Résistance? For pity’s sake, the war is over!”
“The war is, yes, but not what it did to us, mon amie. Marc lost a brother to the Germans. He was only eleven when it happened.”
Phoebe sighed. “Yes, but that was before. Isn’t life supposed to get better now?”
“Of course it is better now,” Simone replied. “You ate strawberries and cream today. You saw a cinema. You put sugar in your tea at lunch. There are no U-boats chasing us across the Atlantic. It is better. But better doesn’t mean that we forget what happened. I don’t know that we will ever forget.”
“Well, I plan to forget how terrible it was sleeping in a Tube station night after night and eating tripe at every meal and wearing the same pair of worn-out shoes for five years. Right, Katrine?”
Annaliese didn’t know how to answer. She wanted to forget everything. She wanted to forget nothing. “I don’t think you can choose what you get to forget,” she said.
Simone yawned. “Katrine’s right. How can you choose to forget something? You’d have to think about it to keep choosing to forget it. Impossible not to remember it then.”
“Well, the first thing I am going to do in America is buy a whole crate of oranges,” Phoebe said. “And bedroom slippers with rhinestones on them. And bath salts. And a new hat. What about you, Katrine? What’s the first thing you want to do?”
Run.
“I don’t know,” Annaliese said, unable to think of a believable lie.
“For heaven’s sake. We need to help you come up with some ideas, then!”
“Maybe just being reunited with her husband is enough,” Simone ventured.
Annaliese looked over at the bunk across from hers. In the dim light provided by a peep of moonlight beyond the porthole curtain she saw Simone staring up at the ceiling, her arms crossed loosely over her head.
“Yes, but after the kisses and hugs, there must be something you gals are looking forward to,” Phoebe said.
Simone peered over the bunk to peek at her bunkmate. “Having someone else to sleep with besides you seems pretty nice.”
Phoebe giggled. The women curled up under their covers.
Within ten minutes Annaliese heard the steady, relaxed breathing of her roommates. She lay on her bed for a long while, going over her escape plan several times before slumber finally claimed her.
She had no idea how long she’d been asleep when she was awakened by whimpering in the bunk across from hers.
The French woman was writhing under the blankets, crying out, “No! No!” in a muffled voice laced with anguish.
“Simone?” Annaliese murmured.
But the woman only thrashed more.
Annaliese climbed out of her bunk and approached Simone’s elevated cot above Phoebe. She reached for her, hoping that Simone was not being chased in her nightmare and that a hand on her arm would not have her think she’d been caught.
“Noooo!” Simone moaned.
Annaliese gently shook her. “Simone!” she whispered as loud as she dared. “Wake up. You’re dreaming,” she said in French.
Simone sat up in bed with a start, her covers clutched to her chest as if they were her clothes.
“You were dreaming!” Annaliese said again, patting her leg.
Simone jolted and turned to Annaliese, unable, it seemed, to remember where she was and who stood by her bunk. Her breath was expelled in a short gasp.
“You had a nightmare,” Annaliese continued, in French.
Simone lowered herself back to her pillow. “I’m sorry I woke you, Katrine.”
“It is all right.” Annaliese climbed back onto her bunk. Below them Phoebe gently snored.
“No. I really am sorry.”
Annaliese pulled up her covers. Simone was a mere shadow now in the darkness. “I have bad dreams, too, sometimes.”
“God, I hope none of yours are like this one.” Simone turned on her mattress to face Annaliese.
“Is it about your father and brother? Is that what you dream?” Annaliese asked.
Simone didn’t immediately answer.
“I am sorry. You don’t have to say,” Annaliese quickly added.
“I dream about something else. Something that happened to me. And something I did.”
Annaliese waited to see if Simone would continue. “I also dream about
things that have happened. And things I did,” she said when the French woman said nothing.
“Do you believe there are some actions that can’t ever be forgiven, Katrine?” Simone asked a moment later.
Annaliese thought of Katrine’s lifeless body, which she’d abandoned in an unforgiving ditch. She thought of the letter she had written to Katrine’s husband, and the stolen identity papers she carried, and all those times she wished Rolf was dead. There had to be as much mercy in the world as there was anguish. There had to be compassion for those who did wrong because they had been wronged. “No, I don’t,” she said.
“How do you know?” Simone murmured.
“I just do.”
“I shot a man, Katrine. I killed him.”
The air in the little room seemed to still. Somehow Annaliese knew the man Simone killed had hurt her in the worst way a man could hurt a woman. She knew that pain.
“He shouldn’t have hurt you,” Annaliese replied.
Simone paused, surprised but grateful, perhaps, that Annaliese had correctly assumed the details. “But I killed him.”
“You wanted him to stop.”
“Yes.” Simone’s voice was barely audible.
“If you had not shot him, what would he have done?”
Simone hesitated only a moment. “I think he might have killed me. Or shared me with his friends. He was Gestapo. He was one of the officers who shot my father and brother. He thought I was Résistance, too.”
“It was war, Simone.”
“And that makes it not a crime?”
“That makes it survival. That is what you do in war. You find a way to survive.”
They were quiet for a moment.
“You sound less like a German when you speak French,” Simone whispered with a tired laugh.
“I would speak French all the time, then, but Phoebe wouldn’t like it.”
Simone chuckled. “Good night, Katrine.”
“Sweet dreams,” Annaliese replied.
She lay awake the remainder of the night, unable to surrender to rest while she pondered all that she still had to do. All the lies she still had to tell. All the forgiveness she would have to beg from heaven.
A Bridge Across the Ocean Page 22